US Study : Societies Suffer When "God is on Our Side"

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world."

Ummmmm. Yeah. Maybe. But then again....

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

And we've got the dysfunctional President to prove it.

This is not just a "developed world" vs. "developing world" thing, either. It's not the dysfunctions of a technological society vs. the traditional, time-honored values of the developing world. Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist

said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

It's not God's fault, in other words. I'm not convinced it's mere belief in God, either. I think this has something to do with how one chooses to believe in God, whether one uses God as a rationalization for exploitation of others and the maintenance of ridiculous myths of cultural or religious superiority and, ultimately cultural, political, or economic dominance.